Today, however, blogging has evolved into a serious marketing strategy. You may have heard of it: Content marketing.

Creating content like blog posts is one of the single most effective ways to drive traffic to your product pages.

How? Because content…

Gives you something valuable to share on your social media accounts

Is easier to get shares and links to

Can rank on Google much easier than product pages

Opens doors to relationships with industry influencers

And so much more!

Let me explain.

Why should you run a blog on your eCommerce store?

I get it - running a store is a full-time job. You have a million and one things to do. Why should you add another thing on your list?

Because, like I showed you above, blog content brings in amazing benefits.

The main benefit is SEO (search engine optimization). How would you like to show up in the top five results of Google when someone searches for your product?

Blogging can do that for you.

Here’s how it works:

Traffic comes from Google, social media, and your email list. From there, it can be funneled to your product pages.

Traffic can also come from links from other pages, but I didn’t include that in the graphic because it’s a more advanced tactic. (Which we’ll talk about in this guide.)

For now, just know this:

Content marketing (blogging) has the potential to drive thousands of visits to your site, and even tens of thousands once you learn proper SEO.

I’ll give you an example. I created a blog post on a brand new site with almost no traffic, and drove 1,607 visitors to the post in just two days:

If that sounds like something you’d like, keep reading.

A quick discussion of SEO

I’ll keep this section super quick, but I wanted to explain what blogging and SEO have to do with eCommerce product pages.

Here’s the thing: In order to rank your site on Google, you need backlinks from other websites.

However, getting backlinks to product pages is really difficult, because they don’t provide any free value. People don’t link to product pages unless something’s in it for them (like a commission).

Getting backlinks to blog pages, on the other hand, is pretty easy. It’s not super difficult to get upwards of 10 to even 50 backlinks to a blog post. (As long as you know what to do, which you'll learn in step 3.)

Those backlinks are SEO gold and can land your post on the first page of Google within a few months (assuming your content is good enough, which you'll learn about in step 2).

When you get a lot of links to a page on your site, any link from that page to another page on your site is given more “SEO juice”.

So if I link blog post A, which has 20 backlinks, to product page B, which has none, that product page will now have a higher chance of ranking on Google… Even without direct backlinks!

Here’s a visual:

Those backlinks to the blog post also provide ranking authority to any page that blog post links to, including your product pages.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t get backlinks to your product pages when you can. But you can rank without as many links.

Hope that makes sense! If not, feel free to ask questions in the comments. Now let’s move on.

Step 1: Pick a killer blog topic

The hardest part of blogging (after promotion) is coming up with good topic ideas.

In my experience, there are two ways to decide on a topic:

Pick a topic for virality

Pick a topic for SEO

Personally, I prefer #2 because virality spikes quickly then drops off, where as SEO starts slow but ramps up and tends to drive more traffic over time.

Besides, SEO starts with a spike as well (if you do it right).

How to come up with topic ideas

Regardless of which “type” of article you’re going with, you still need a topic idea.

There are a LOT of ways to come up with topics. Since I prefer SEO and long-term wins, I’ll let you in on my methods, which involve keyword research and finding authority sites.

First, find 5 to 10 high-quality blogs in your industry.

These can be competitors to solo bloggers and everything in between. You’re going to use their site to find popular content around your niche.

Pro Tip: Create a Google sheet to keep track of this list. I like to note the blog URL, title, editor/owner, and contact info. I also keep track of DA (domain authority) by popping their site into Moz OSE. A high domain authority means a link from their site carries more weight for your SEO.

(Note: You can also use a Google sheet to keep track of your blog topic ideas.)

You probably already have a few blogs/sites in mind. However, if you don’t know where to find them, here are a few strategies:

1. Use BuzzSumo to find viral content around your topic.

BuzzSumo is a tool that allows you to see what content is performing the best around a particular topic or on a particular site.

You can use it to find both topic ideas and other quality blogs.

Just type in a keyword around your niche. For me, that meant searching for “RVing”:

From there, I already have a few good ideas:

RV cooking, meal prepping, and recipes

RV travel destinations

Seeing concerts in an RV

Advice around what tools to bring in your RV

These topics all got 1k to 2.5k shares, so we know they have viral potential. They’re also potential websites to get backlinks from. Write ‘em down!

2. Use Ahrefs to spy on your competition

This is one of my personal favorite ways to find keywords AND topic ideas in just a few minutes.

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that shows you how difficult it is to rank for a keyword, how much search traffic a keyword gets, and viral content (sort of like BuzzSumo).

Take the blogs you discovered in step one or know off the top of your head, and pop them into Ahrefs. (They give you a two week free trial.)

Then, click the “Organic Search” tab.

Scroll down and click “View full report” under “Top 5 organic keywords”.

Next we need to filter these results to show only low KD, high volume keywords in the top 20 results (since the lite version won’t let you see past that).

Now you have an awesome list of potential keywords. Dig through until you find some good blog topic ideas. Here are a few I noticed:

It looks like “rv blogs”, “how to winterize an rv” and “types of rvs” are all fairly high volume keywords with fairly low ranking difficulty.

If I were going to choose one, I’d pick “how to winterize an rv” because it has the lowest difficulty, and also because I can target both that keyword and the “winterizing rv” keyword for double the potential traffic!

How to hire freelance writers

Your other option to get the writing done without actually writing is to hire a freelance writer.

They’re pretty easy to find these days. Just look for people with great reviews on Upwork or People Per Hour.

My advice is to hire 3 to 5 people and give them each the same, small assignment. Pay them for their work, of course, and give the best one or two the full gig.

Pro Tip: Look for people with a journalism background. Journalists are natural fact-finders and researchers, so you know everything will be fact-checked. They’re also good at outreach, so you could even hire them to get influencer input as well.

Oh, and a quick note on images - great images really do matter. They increase shares, links, and engagement. If you need help creating awesome images, use a tool like Relay That to easily create awesome images at the click of a button.

But you should know: Creating the blog post is only a small part of successful eCommerce content marketing. You can’t skip the next step.

Step 3: Promote your content like crazy

You can spend hours researching and writing a blog post, but it won’t mean squat if you don’t promote it.

I know because it’s happened to me. More than once.

I spent almost a week putting together an amazing blog post, but didn’t do anything to promote it besides sharing it on social media. It got a whopping 50 views, none of which converted.

So how do you avoid the content abyss?

You spend as much, if not more time promoting your post as you did writing it.

Free ways to promote your blog

Let’s start with free, because who doesn’t love free money?

There are a ton of free content promotion strategies:

Social media

Email outreach

Forum marketing

Comment marketing

Let me briefly go through each one.

1. Social media marketing

You just publish a post, then push it out to social media.

All good, right?

Wrong!

Social media isn’t a content publishing platform. People don’t go to Facebook to read your articles. They go there to be freaking social!

So what should you do instead?

Engage with your followers. Let me give you an example…

My Facebook page for my RV travel blog typically got 0-4 likes, no comments and no shares on every post. Until I started tagging people.

I tagged everyone who participated in my roundup post, and it went fairly viral. I got 22 likes, 11 shares, and reached 1,800 people organically...

2. Social media ads

(Unless you can drum up enough engagement on your posts through manual outreach. Facebook’s algorithm will show your updates to more people if a post gets a lot of initial likes, comments, and shares.)

The other social networks are following suite. Everyone wants their money!